23 Apr The importance of a felt sense of safety in a child’s life

It has become very apparent to me over the many years of helping children in my clinic that a felt sense of safety is not just important for the beingness of a child’s happiness but an absolute necessity.

I have sat with thousands of children and their worried parents who come to me to help them get to the root of what is causing their child’s behavioural issues. I hear the same story over and over again about how the behaviour of the child becomes very difficult to manage and how their behaviour in school has become a problem.

The question that cannot seem to be answered for most worried parents and teachers is “what’s wrong”?

From my experience the questions we ask children and the way in which we ask them makes all the difference in finding out “what’s wrong”

To me what’s wrong is only ever a result of “what’s happened”

So the question that really needs answering is not what’s wrong but what happened.

This is not as easy as simply asking a child to tell you what’s happened, as this kind of answer requires a felt sense of safety within the child’s body, mind and soul before there can ever be enough trust to release this information without fear of judgement.

I would like to take things back a small bit to create some context about how the mind and nervous system of a child works in relation to safety. This is a very basic summary of the workings of the nervous system but it will suffice for the intention of this short article.

For more information on the nervous system (Dr. Stephen W Porges – the Polyvagal Theory) is an interesting place to begin.

For a child their nervous system is designed to react to internal and external stimuli to ensure survival.

These stimuli can be either physical and/or psychological to name a few.

The nervous system does not discriminate, it simply responds with safety as its priority.

This is extremely important to understand when working with a child’s behaviour as the nervous system can be responding to stimuli that neither the child or the parent / teacher may be aware of.

To add to this the conscious mind is only made up of roughly 5% of the brain’s activity leaving 95% of the brain’s activity unconscious.

To put it in very simple terms, we don’t know what our brain is thinking 95% of the time.

So when we look at a child’s behaviour from this perspective it’s possible that we are looking at a full body reaction to a hidden stimulus that occupies 95% of the child’s unconscious mind that can’t be seen, heard or understood from a conscious stand point.

So when asking a child “what’s wrong” it’s no wonder that their behaviour might change as there is only a 5% chance that they even know.

Examples of how the the body communicates what the mind is unaware of include, constipation, headaches, sweating from the head at night, night terrors, sleep walking, fainting, disassociation, nail biting, watery eyes, nightmares, wetting the bed, bumping into things “clumsiness”, craving sugar, itchy ears, burning feet, tummy pain etc etc…

As you can see from this list, there are many many ways the body communicates with us. This list is only a very small example of symptoms I have seen manifest over the years. The language of the body is sensation and symptoms are a language.

We must learn to understand this language.

So….. back to a felt sense of safety.

When I work with children and young adults the first thing that needs to be established from my experience is a level of trust.

Without trust in any relationship the chances of efficient and positive forward momentum is very limited.

This trust can be established in a number of ways but relatability and connection is vital. If a child does not feel acknowledged, seen or heard for who they are at that exact moment then their nervous system stays right where it is.

However, if they feel within themselves that you really hear them, you see them as they are and you meet them where they are right now, then the gateway to safety can begin to open up.

Allowing a child to be exactly who they are and meeting them exactly where they are is a huge relief for a child and any person for that matter.

If you yourself hold a space within you that allows another person to feel safe enough within themselves to be who they are, then you have given that person a very special gift.

The gift of presence.

When this presence is felt by a child’s nervous system I have found many many times that they begin to talk about events that they may have never mentioned before.

Events that happened that may appear small to others but had a massive impact on them at that time. This is when you really see the power of suppressed emotion.

For a lot of people who become overwhelmed internally on an emotional level they can disassociate from the pain of the past and until they feel a genuine and compassionate sense of safety again the information that needs to be processed cannot come forward. They simply do not feel safe enough.

“It’s not what you know but what you don’t know you know that hurts the most “

A very important note to all parents and teachers. It is not your fault if a child’s nervous system does not feel safe so blaming yourself and getting reactive when you cannot seem to get to the bottom of what’s wrong will not help you or your child.

This felt sense of safety is something that must be embodied by us all so that our children can feel it from us.

By doing so you are teaching them that an embodied sense of safety is an acceptable feeling to have. This way if that felt sense is not there for whatever reason they will be able to recognize it for what it is and ask for help. Instead of suppressing the feeling and triggering the nervous system into a defensive state.

From my experience the most effective way to help regulate a child’s nervous system is to regulate our own.

Safety is an inside job – We must be the difference we wish to see in our children and show them that feeling their feelings is the path to their healing.

Holding a compassionate space for children and their parents is an incredibly humbling experience, to be able to resonate with the soul of a suffering child to bring even the slightest flicker of light into what might be a very dark place can bring about miracles that many today simply don’t believe is possible.

Remember, if there is a reason, then there is a way.